If you've encountered any mention of The Lifespan of a Fact by John D'Agata and Jim Fingal, you've probably heard that it's about one guy (D'Agata) who wrote an essay about a teenager who killed himself in Las Vegas, and another guy (Fingal) who was hired to fact-check that essay and discovered that a lot of it was made up.

In a recent essay in The New York Times, Jonathan Ames wrote about kipple. I was thrilled. Not just because it�s nice to see other people writing about the messes of their lives, but also because kipple has been a favorite term of mine ever since I encountered it in Philip K. Dick�s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

One of my favorite descriptions of just about anything is Greil Marcus's description of Bob Dylan's bootleg "basement tapes" as harking back to "the old, weird America" of the songs collected on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music records. Marcus, in fact, titled his book about the basement tapes The Old, Weird America. Within the science fiction community, there's been lots of discussion of The New Weird over the last decade, but listening to Smith's Anthology provides a more profoundly weird experience than any I've ever had with fiction.

Joanna Russ died a week ago as I write this. Or, to be more accurate: Joanna Russ died a week ago as I struggle to write this. I thought I might collect some of her sentences and frame them with my own as a memorial, but once I started rereading her works, I got stuck. It'll be easy, I told myself. Just find some good passages and proclaim their wonders and note what we've lost in losing Russ and— And easier thought than done.

My tendency to be my own Devil's Advocate came out with a vengeance recently as I tried, and failed, to write a tenth anniversary appreciation of a book I love: Sexing the Body by Anne Fausto-Sterling.

I had something else ready for this column, but then I read a story in the New York Times with this opening paragraph: "It started with a Twitter message on Sept. 19: 'Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly's room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.'"

Reading multiple books at once inevitably causes words, phrases, entire paragraphs to pose and juxtapose and interpose and superimpose, to dance and breed, until the reader's mind is either a cacophony of a symphony, and the closed covers of books resting on a table or the floor cannot silence all the notes they've got to share.

Guns and feminism have been a common element of my life for a long time. I owe my openness to feminism to Isaac Asimov, who wrote in one of his books (or in an editorial for Asimov's, maybe) that he was a proud supporter of the feminist cause and was even willing to call himself a feminist. When I was twelve years old, that was good enough for me, and it kept me from associating the word "feminism" with anything negative—I worshipped Isaac Asimov, and if he said the word was a good one, I believed him.

A friend of mine and his sister came over to visit one night. His sister was in her early twenties and enthusiastic about various political causes. Many things she had become aware of disgusted and horrified her about American society, business, and government. She was a vegetarian and had decided on this lifestyle for moral reasons rather than reasons of health.

Grisham posed his idea of plot-driven fiction as a distinction from "literature", but he might be surprised to learn that his idea has precedents among the highest of brows: in what is generally considered the first work of literary criticism, The Poetics, Aristotle argued that plot (mythos) is superior to every other element of tragedy, which he considered the highest form of literary art. To Aristotle, action is most important, and the writer's arrangement of incidents leads to the most vital effects of tragedy.

I am a bookshelf voyeur; any time I go into a room with books, I spy and pry. A new room—whether a waiting room, an office, a basement used for storage—always contains excitement for me if it has books, because, until I have thoroughly pored over them, there is the potential for surprise, and the potential is often as electrifying as the reality.

For a few years, I did not want to admit an attraction to horror stories. It's an odd thing to have done, since if any type of stories has consistently attracted me as a reader, they are horror stories, but nonetheless, when I started coming to terms with the fact that yes, my life as a reader had been and was going to continue to be the life of someone profoundly affected by and attracted to genre fiction, I didn't want to admit that the effect and the attraction included horror fiction.

A couple years ago, I picked up another copy of China Mountain Zhang at a used bookstore, but I didn't dare read it. Much of the science fiction I had loved as a teen had turned out, when read as an adult, to feel simplistic, clunky, shallow. I preferred my memories.

One huge girder catapulted twenty blocks, pierced the roof of a subway tunnel and jackknifed the leading car of an eight-car train. Passengers were pulped. There had been sixty persons in that first car. There was nothing that could be called human in the wreckage.

I'm astounded at the quality and creativity in so many different magazines that don't get marketed to what seems to me a natural audience—readers who like their fiction to be at least a little bit odd, a little bit out of the ordinary.

Herr Doktor Kafka offers Lizaveta the comfort of a story, saying that Belinda met a little boy who asked her to travel around the world with him, and so she has gone off to do so, but has promised to send postcards chronicling her adventures.

When I first encountered "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)", I read a few pages and stopped. The idea of a story about Pol Pot written in what felt like the diction of a fairy tale was too much for me.

I could somehow find a few hundred boxes, put the books in them, load the boxes into a big truck, and drive the truck to my new home, where I would then pile the books up to the ceiling in each little room.

Vonnegut approached paragraphs the way good poets approach line and stanza breaks, and in that sense he was the Robert Creeley of prose, someone whose writing at its best seems perfect in its rhythm and shape

Depending on my mood I think the description of a person dominated by testosterone fits me pretty well, too, although I know I only think that because, being made of estrogen, I'm flexible and imaginative.

I am at this particular moment working from the assumption that you understand the majority of what I am writing here. I am, then, assuming that most of these sentences are accessible. To do that, I have to make some assumptions about my audience.

But the wonder of Seligman's book is that he is able to think about the two writers together, to discover their commonalities without ignoring their differences, to celebrate their achievements without blinding himself to their faults.